The present application relates to network management, and more particularly to a visual programming system for network management.
Note that the points discussed below may reflect the hindsight gained from the disclosed inventions, and are not necessarily admitted to be prior art.
In the modern computer age, businesses rely on an electronic network to function properly. Networks are getting more and more complex but network engineers still depend on the traditional methods and tools, such as the text-based command-line interface (CLI), to manage their networks. To troubleshoot a network problem or to simply verify if a network functions, a network engineer still needs to manually log in to each of the network devices and issue a CLI command to gather the data, manually parse and analyze each of the output for key data, and manually eliminate each of the possible problem causes.
For each of the enterprises across the vast network world, this process may be repeated again and again, without any benefit from learning past lessons or from other people's experiences. This process is a waste of time and energy for an engineer, and certainly a waste of a company's sparse resources.
To further complicate this already tangled process, many vendors and models of network hardware devices that exist in today's network, are providing different sets of CLI commands which output many different formats of data information. It is difficult, if not impossible, for a network engineer to simplify this process by writing a simple executable program to retrieve, parse and analyze the output data of each of these different devices. It is even more challenging to require a network engineer to master a programming language in a short time, and apply such skills in a reliable manner.
There is an urgent need to find a universal solution to be able to parse and analyze data outputs of different devices from various vendors. There is an urgent need for a network management system that guides a network engineer through visual user interfaces and samples, and enables him to customize their data analysis without having to master a programming language.